Rock Of Ages: A Song History
"Rock of Ages" is the work of Augustus Montague Toplady (1740–1778), a Church of England clergyman. Its first stanza reached print in the October 1775 issue of the Gospel Magazine, tucked into an essay titled "Life a Journey," and the full four-stanza hymn followed in the same periodical in March 1776.[1][2] There it came after a question-and-answer calculation of the British national debt that was turned into a reflection on the debt of human sin, and it carried the heading "A living and dying Prayer for the Holiest Believer in the World."[1][2] Toplady reprinted it, with one line altered, in his Psalms and Hymns for Public and Private Worship later in 1776.[2] Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology saw Toplady using the hymn to argue against John Wesley's teaching that complete holiness was attainable in this life.[1] Some writers have also suggested, without firm proof, that its imagery owes something to Daniel Brevint's 1673 treatise on the sacrament, which the Wesleys had adapted for their own hymns.[2]
Cliffs, Cheddar, England, photochrom, c. 1890-1900. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
A well-loved legend says Toplady wrote the hymn while he was a curate at Blagdon in Somerset in the early 1760s, after sheltering from a thunderstorm in a cleft in the rocks at nearby Burrington Combe. The supplement to Julian's Dictionary found no trace of the story in the parish before a new rector arrived in 1850, some seventy-five years after the hymn appeared.[1] The Hymnology Archive reports that E. J. Fasham, who spent years studying the hymn's origins and the stories attached to it, concluded that the evidence pointed to its writing between October and December 1774 at Broadhembury in Devon.[2]
The tune most Americans know, TOPLADY, is by Thomas Hastings (1784–1872); Hymnary.org dates it to 1830.[3] Its earliest surviving printing is in Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (1832), edited by Hastings and Lowell Mason, probably after an 1831 printing that is now lost, and it took the name TOPLADY only in 1859.[1][2] In England the text is closely tied instead to a tune by Richard Redhead, with which it was paired in the first Hymns Ancient & Modern (1861).[2] Hymnary.org counts the text in more than 3,200 hymnals and Hastings's tune in nearly 1,600.[1][3]
Find books with Rock Of Ages for sale →